The postman called but left my letter next door.

It was in a stiff white official-looking envelope which that considerate functionary had not wished to damage. Good for him, for I should not have wished for a fold to disfigure what will henceforth be one of my prized possessions.

Soon to be framed behind glass, my certificate of life membership of the National Union of Journalists, signed by our general secretary, Michelle Stanistreet, will be displayed, though not ostentatiously, somewhere in the house where it is likely to catch the eye.

In this manner, you might recall, did the splendid Susan Wyse, of EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels, ensure that no one failed to notice the insignia of the MBE that King George VI had been pleased to bestow upon her.

Truly, this award is indeed an honour and one which I had not been expecting. I learned of it only when I contacted the union head office to ask what I needed to do concerning subscriptions in the light of my recently acquired semi-retired status. The helpful official told me that I need no longer pay them and that, indeed, with more than 40 years of uninterrupted union membership – 44 in fact – I was amply qualified to become a ‘lifer’.

A move to make me such would be tabled by him at the appropriate time. And it was. The letter accompanying my certificate and new life membership card told me: “We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your long and loyal support of the NUJ.”

My colleagues in the profession will hardly need reminding that I have not, for many years, been an especially active member of our chapel (the workplace section of the union) or branch, content to leave the work to other, younger, hands.

More motivated ones, too, though my membership of the union has always been a matter settled. How can one do other, as a worker, than belong to the only organisation fighting to secure one’s wages and conditions?

How contemptible it is, conversely, for people to grab these benefits having had no part in the campaign for them and, indeed, undermined it whenever they could.

This was the situation we encountered during the one longish piece of industrial action in which I was involved, the nine-week strike of provincial journalists at the close of 1979. This earned everyone involved a big-money-in-those-days rise of about £20 a week, an acknowledgement of how miserably paid we had been. The rise was, of course, eagerly pocketed by all those who had carried on working. It was, they would say, their reward for loyalty to the company. Others might say differently.

The strike led me into fields of activity previously alien to my experience, principally in the area of fundraising. These included peddling fruit pies, baked in the kitchen of my Osney Island home, at Oxford’s open market.

The house, among the handiest for the picket line, also served as a feeding centre for our members and an office for the production of our strike newspaper. Principally involved in this, head down over my dining table, was sub-editor Mary Riddell who is now a big name newspaper columnist – “that Wednesday woman”, to those readers of the Daily Telegraph who find her political views suspect.

Fundraising of a more general sort was the aim of the Press Ball, on whose committee I served for a number of years. At one event, owing to the enthusiasm of Radio Oxford’s Gordon Kitchen, we engaged the services of the Syd Lawrence Orchestra, a budget-busting extravagance that left little money for charity. Gordon’s endearing insistence on placing ‘party poppers’ on the agenda at every meeting is another memory of those times.

At one ball I was offered an almost textbook illustration of tolerance by our star guest whom I escorted to the ball after her stint on the stage at Oxford Playhouse. This was Carol Cleveland, the “seventh Python” and the most regular woman – of the real sort – to figure in the classic comedy show.

Would I have dared to recite from my favourite Monty Python sketches in her presence? You bet. And would she join in? Amazingly, yes!